A Swedish American in Sweden

Friday, June 03, 2016

It's not even a particularly good picture. But that doesn't matter.
The banal can be hellish.

This is my Hell. It doesn’t look like much. It’s just a
sack. From PetSmart. But what’s inside was the culmination of over an hour of
frantic work.

My girlfriend and I made some burritos tonight. They were
fine. That’s not really important except for the fact that we made them at my
place. But in the summer, it’s hard to get the temperature in my place below
80. So we headed to her apartment for the night. In the front door. Up the
stairs. In through the apartment door. Drop my stuff. Head to the kitchen. And
stop. On a dime. Something is not right. There’s a smell of dead fish, smushed
poop, and shame.

Immediately, we’re searching. We need to stop this smell.
Then, suddenly, a cat swishes by. Her tail high in the air and what looks to be
a breakfast sausage hanging from her matted butthair (One word. It’s a
technical term.). And my chin drops to my chest.

Things have gotten better since
I last wrote about these cats. They still scream the screams of a thousand
spawns of Satan and they still dig their demon claws into my toes, but it isn’t
as frequent. I’ve come to an agreement with Cat. I walk into the apartment, she
sees me, runs to the bedroom grunting until I come in to brush her. She flops
to the ground like a medieval holy woman in the throes of ecstasy and rolls around as I brush
off enough hair to knit a third cat. Finally, we part ways and go about our days.
Other Cat pretends to be my friend, snuggles up against my chest staring at me
with what she seems to think are cute kitty eyes. Then she moves closer.
Slowly. As if she’s fooling me. And tries to lick my beard. She does not. So
things are getting better. Of course better does not mean good. Better never
means good.

And today was not a good day. Or even a better day. Today
was a day that ended with me questioning all of my life choices and how those
choices brought me to this moment. Because as I follow the cat with the
breakfast sausage (spoiler alert: it was poop) hanging from her butthair, I
realize that she is jumping onto the bed. And as I yell “no,” the tortured no
of a person who knows there is nothing that can be done, but needs to vocalize
that helplessness, the cat begins scooting her hindquarters across the bed. The
breakfast sausage that drags beneath her smears across what was once a
(relatively) clean blanket. And my chin drops to my chest. Again.

My girlfriend has identified poop smears across the entire
kitchen floor, into the hall, and onto the rug in the bedroom. There are
several spots. The smell is stuck in my nosehairs. I corner a very agitated cat as my girlfriend approaches with scissors in hand. The smell is terrible as she deftly cuts away a turd the likes of which I did not know a cat could produce. Other Cat decides that this is the perfect (not purrfect, get out of here with that nonsense) time to lick my beard. And my chins drops to my chest. Yet again.

Here’s the thing: scatological
humor gets me every time. I’m 32. I have an admittedly juvenile inclination
towards poop jokes. But as I get onto my hands and knees to scrub cat poop off
the floor, I am not laughing. As we fill a plastic sack from PetSmart with butthair, cat poop, and soiled paper towels, I am not laughing. As my girlfriend trudges to the basement with an
unclean blanket with plans to launder it, I am not laughing. When she comes
back up to tell me that the washing machine is broken, that she needs my help,
I am not laughing. And when I realize that the laundry machine is broken
broken, that I can barely change the oil in my car, let alone fix a laundry
machine, I am not laughing. I stay in the basement for a while. At least it
doesn’t stink down here.

Finally, the adult in me walks back up the three flights of
stairs. Opens the door only to be blasted by a smell that I have finally grown
accustomed to. I spray the entire kitchen floor with Windex. It’s a strong,
chemical smell that masks the scent. My girlfriend lights a candle. I vacuum,
scrub the rugs, wash the floors, and curse the cats. I know it’s not the cat’s
fault. Every rational part of me knows that. But the fact remains that I am
spending my Friday night cleaning cat poop. Or was. Now I’m eating a mint ice
cream sandwich, sitting next to an open window, hoping the memory and smells
will fade.

But even as I write this, Other Cat is taking laps around my
lap. Back and forth. She can’t decide if she’d rather lick my beard or shove
her backside in my face. I keep shooing her away. She keeps coming back. She just
keeps coming back. Cat lovers will tell you it’s a sign of affection. It’s
cute. Just like when they bring you dead animals. Affection. Cute. Cat lovers
will lie to you and tell you cats are clean and proper and easy to cohabitate
with. They will try to justify the behavior of these sociopaths. You might even
fall for it. Then suddenly you’ll realize that you’re spending your Friday
night cleaning cat poop off every surface you can possibly imagine.

Welcome to Swedish America. And a blog that is slowly, oh,
so slowly, turning into a space for me to vent about cats.

Monday, February 29, 2016

While Sweden is considered to be a leader in gender equality today, there has been and still is an expectation, whether implicit or explicit, that men propose marriage. But skottdagen is different. Skottdag or skottår is leap year. Skott, in this case, means to add something into the mix. Like an extra day, for example. It’s one of those days where the world is turned upside down. Used to a year of 365 days? Tough, this one has 366! And when the world is turned upside down, it’s acceptable for women to propose.

Since the late 1800s, there’s been a tradition in Sweden that suggests that women are allowed to propose marriage on leap-year day. That awkward term, leap-year day? That’s because leap-year day hasn’t always been February 29. Turns out that before a bunch of different calendar reforms, Sweden recognized leap year on February 24 every year. In fact, February 29 as leap year in Sweden is relatively new. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that February 24 became just a normal day and February 29 was added to the calendar.

This unsuspecting man has no chance in a
postcard from the 1920s.
Image available at JanOlssonVykort.se

But the tradition suggesting that women can propose marriage has been around longer than that. It probably made its way over from England, maybe Scotland, sometime during the 1850s. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, it had gained a little steam. Folks started joking about it. People sold postcards depicting men being chased by women with nets, women shooting Cupid’s arrows at the man they hoped to marry, and women, literally, about to bag themselves a man. Those postcards depicting age-old stereotypes, those jokes about women taking control probably further cemented the gender expectations. But along with joking about it, it seems that the tradition had at least some affect on the way women interacted with men. While there probably weren’t droves of women proposing to their partners in 1903, there probably were a decent chunk of women who felt a bit more emboldened to flirt, to show some interest, to, you know, admit that they had and could show interest and initiative with regards to men.

That’s the fun thing with traditions, they pop up, they change, they adapt and adopt, and then they disappear. Sometimes those traditions are limited to certain groups of people, which seems to be the case with women proposing in Sweden during a leap year. That is, that tradition never really took off with anyone but the Swedish bourgeois. But whether it was a domestic servant on a farm in Skåne proposing or a young woman living at home in Stockholm with support from her family proposing, folks then, and now, knew what they were expected to do.

Traditions are change, but they are there for a reason. They serve some purpose. What that purpose is probably depends on who you ask. This one, for example, could suggest gender expectations (for both men and women) were so rigid that a day on which women were "allowed" to propose could be adopted (and then adapted) giving some women just a hint of freedom. So leap year traditions become an interesting look at upended gender expectations. Of course women could propose 100 years ago. They just didn’t. At least not regularly. Societal expectations are strong and dominate how we act in the context of that society. Whether we want to openly admit that or not. So when a tradition that came along and said women could shed those societal expectations, even for just a day, people paid attention. Because think about it for just a minute. This tradition suggests that women are only allowed to propose once every four years. One day out of 1,461 days.

Of course, today there’s much less stigma attached to a woman proposing to a man. Or a woman proposing to a woman for that matter. But that doesn’t mean for a second that the expectations don’t still exist. The tradition still exists, although it's not widespread and active in the sense that women everywhere have been counting down these last 1,460 days until they can propose. But it is still widely recognized. It’s still serving some purpose. Search for some variation of “skottdag” and “frieri” in your favorite search engine today and you’ll get articles popping up from all over Sweden See? I told you:Fritt fram för frieri – den mytomspunna skottdagen är här from Örnsköldsviks AllehandaSkottdag — dags att fria from SydsvenskanSkottdagen – då är det dags att passa på att fria from Svenska DagbladetFrieri i P4 Jämtland på skottdagen from Sveriges Radio

So why does the tradition live on in a country that prides itself on being a bastion of gender equality? There are all kinds of arguments to be made. Maybe it’s just kind of a joke. People get a kick out of reliving those old traditions as if to say, look at our silly ancestors and look at how far we’ve come. Or maybe it’s more serious than that. Structural gender inequality, while less obvious in Sweden than in most places, suggests that there are still normative gender expectations, which can be subverted through tradition. Or maybe it's a way to hammer home gender stereotypes, by focusing on the one day when it is "acceptable" for a woman to propose. Or maybe people are just nervous about popping the question and need an excuse.

Interestingly, according to Jonas Engman, a folklorist at the Nordic Museum, the day is also seen by many to be imbued with lots of luck—sometimes good, but usually bad. Take that for what it’s worth.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

When I was in college, I went to Sweden for a summer. I
found myself on a farm, mucking horse stalls, baling hay for a little while,
and also working part-time installing ventilation systems and part-time at a
car-parts store. I do not like horses. I am not a cowboy. I do not know
anything about ventilation systems. And I take my car to a mechanic for nearly
everything. So clearly, I was pretty successful in all of my summer endeavors.
But despite all those different experiences, what sticks out most is waking up
one morning. That’s because I woke up to a nightmare. There was a cat, sitting
in my closet on a pile of my clothes, disemboweling a hare. Fun fact: the noise
of a cat tearing into a hare is loud enough to wake a person up.

When I realized what was happening, I ran downstairs to grab
a shovel. Not to kill the cat, but to shovel up the dead remains of a hare. By
the time I got back to the scene of the crime, the cat had dragged the hare
around two entire rooms, leaving blood and remains everywhere. It was like a
miniature murder scene. I cleaned up after the cat, cursing, and vowing to avoid
any dealings with cats again. Because one incident is enough. ‘Twas not to be.

I returned to Oregon to find that my roommates had adopted a
cat. A cat that enjoyed peeing in my room, pooping on my bathroom rug, and
generally screaming at me. But this was years ago. Nearly ten years ago, in
fact. Scars heal. Memories fade. That sort of thing. Yet here I am, rehashing
the trauma inflicted upon me by Lucifer’s handmaidens.

That’s because my girlfriend has cats. Two of them. I do not
like cats. For several reasons, including those outlined above. A few days ago,
those cats moved out to Wisconsin with AJR. By car. We were part of a small
caravan moving across the country. We drove almost a thousand miles with two
cats in the car. We also spent one night in a hotel with two cats. I tell
cat-owners this and they shake their head with a knowing smile. A knowing smile
that is full of empathy, sympathy, pity, even trauma. Smiles can say a lot.

That’s before I tell them that I was attacked by a cat at
3am. It dug its demon claws into my toes, while trying to communicate with its
banshee brothers through a wide-mouthed mawing. I buried my head in the pillow
and my feet in the sheets in hopes of trying to sleep. Or at least in hopes of
keeping my toes in tact and not stabbing pencils into my ears to dampen the
noise. Unfortunately, it was at this point that the cat decided it was best to
begin parading back and forth across my head as it screamed the scream of a
thousand spawns of Satan. For an hour. Around 4:00, I began plotting my
revenge. By 4:30, I was on the verge of tears. By 5:00, I was debating on
packing everything into the car, cats included, and driving the rest of the way
to Wisconsin. Unfortunately, the aforementioned caravan meant we were stuck.
Because if there’s one thing I learned from The Oregon Trail it’s that you
never leave your caravan behind. That’s how folks die of dysentery. Or
starvation because no one brought back 200 pounds of meat.

Eventually, AJR locked the cats into the bathroom. With the
air conditioning cranked up their screams were muffled and, for a few sweet
hours, I slept the sleep of a drunken baby. But Bruce Springsteen serenaded me
just a couple of hours later, and it was time to continue our drive westward.
My eyes burned. My body ached. My ears echoed. My toes were nervous. Suddenly,
the zombie-like state of my friends who have young children made sense. A
fitful sleep punctuated by screaming does not a rested person make. At least a
cat can be locked in a bathroom with some food, water, and a litter box. Pretty
sure that constitutes neglect if you replace the cat with a baby.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Every June, Swedes throughout the world gather around a large, green pole and dance and sing and drink. They pretend to be frogs, they pretend to be little old ladies, they pretend to wash clothes and go to church. And they hold hands and skip and dance around the Midsummer pole. Then they eat herring, drink akvavit while singing, hide from the rain, maybe go for a midnight skinny dip in the closest body of water, and if they’re really fulfilling stereotypes, they have sex. All this to celebrate the longest day of the year. Or the shortest night of the year. I suppose it depends on your perspective.

Just like so many of the other Swedish holidays, the big day is not the actual day, it’s the eve. Midsommarafton. Midsummer Eve. Unlike Shakespeare, who was dreaming on the actual night of Midsummer, the Swedes like to get an early start. It might be because of all those supernatural beings hanging out that night. If you’ve been paying attention to the Swedish holidays, you’ve probably noticed a theme. Eves and evils. Or at least eves and supernatural beings. But that doesn’t have the same ring to it.

The holiday has been around for a while—at least since the 1500s and probably much earlier than that. Midsummer used to be celebrated on June 24, which happens to be John the Baptist’s feast day. That meant that Midsummer Eve was always June 23rd. But back in 1953, that changed. The Swedish government decided that Midsummer Eve would always fall on a Friday, which means that Midsummer in Sweden can be any day between June 20 and June 26. That’s good for Swedes. Mostly because it ensures that there is no chance that the holiday will fall on a Saturday or Sunday leaving someone with one less day off from work.

Moving it to a Friday also means folks have a couple of days to recover. Because Midsummer is a drinking holiday. In 2014, according to Systembolaget’s sales statistics, over one million customers came in on the Thursday before Midsummer Eve. And the week of Midsummer? Over 2.5 million. Keep in mind that Midsummer week is only four days long because Systembolaget is closed Friday and Saturday due to the holiday and always closed on Sundays. Those 2.5 million customers bought over 14 million liters of alcohol in one form or another. Sweden has a population of just under 10 million. Like I said, Midsummer is a drinking holiday.

But, thanks to some pretty solid alcohol problems in Sweden in the late 1800s and early 1900s, drinking akvavit with a meal became more common. The idea being, of course, that a little food in your stomach will do you good. Luckily, a lot of those 14 million liters are consumed at dinner. Your typical Midsummer menu will include five things. Only three of those are foods. Since the early 1900s folks have been eating herring and potatoes for the meal; strawberries for dessert. Beer and akvavit have wet many a whistle in Sweden. Drinking songs will most likely break out, the classic being “Helan Går.” While the Midsummer menu might be relatively new, “Helan Går” has been around since at least 1845 and, according to ethnologist Mats Rehnberg, much earlier. Folklorist Christina Mattsson points out that August Strindberg even tried convincing people that it should be viewed with the same reverence as the Swedish national anthem. For some folks, that’s probably rings true today.

This holiday isn’t just about drinking though. There’s a big pole standing erect in the middle of the celebration. It’s called either the Midsommarstång, Midsummer pole, or the Majstång, Maypole. And it has nothing to do with the month of May. At least not in Swedish. Maja as a verb means to decorate with green leaves. And once that pole is dressed up in green leaves, people dance around it. Sometimes they dance traditional folk dances in their traditional folk costumes and sing traditional folk songs. Sometimes they pretend to be frogs and hop around. Sometimes they pretend to be washing their clothes every day of the week before heading to church on Sunday. Because people like to dance and sing and celebrate and pretend they are someone else.

Local folk dance enthusiasts cutting a rug. Or a wooden stage.

That pole, despite what remains of my 13-year old self says, is not phallic according to Jonas Engman over at the Nordic Museum. Instead, the fact that we see it as phallic is more a comment on the way folks saw the world back in the late 1800s. I blame Freud. Of course, the idea has stuck around. Get your mind out of the gutter, is the lesson here. Sometimes a tree is just a tree. Not a penis. And sometimes a big, green pole with hoops to the left and right is just a big, green pole with hoops to the left and right. Not a penis. It might be celebrating the changing of the seasons, the greening of the pastures, the growing of the crops. It might be some sort of reference to pagan beliefs in sacred trees. It might be symbolic of the world axis. Maybe folks just needed something to dance around.

But just because the Midsummer pole is not a penis, doesn’t mean there can’t be some sexy thoughts. Or at least marriage thoughts. Because there are so many supernatural beings out and about on Midsummer, it’s a good time to look into the future. One way of doing that is to place a bunch of flowers under your pillow. Usually it is seven or nine different types. Or sometimes it’s the handpicked wreath of flowers that you’ve worn atop your head all night. Either way, those flowers, if placed under your pillow at night, will help you to dream about the person you will spend the rest of your life with. No word on whether or not this is a nightmare.

Midsummer has become one of those quintessential Swedish holidays. It’s the stuff of stereotypes and movies and beer commercials. It’s a time of tradition, but traditions that have changed dramatically over the last 500 years. Those traditions are changing today and will continue to change tomorrow. They always change. Sometimes those changes are for the better if it means not having to see Grandpa Sven rolling around naked in the grass trying to fix his creaky hip.

Regardless of those changes, for many, Midsummer is a marker of Swedishness. A time to identify as Swedish, whatever that means. For others, it’s a time to identify as part of a family or of a group of friends. Still others will simply eat some herring, a potato or two, and take a shot of akvavit and call it a day. And then there are plenty who don’t do a damn thing. Midsummer Eve is just another Friday. Like all holidays, there is no right way to celebrate, there is only your way.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Traditions come in many forms and they are constantly changing. They’re the foods we eat at Christmas and the clothes we wear at weddings and the songs we sing at sporting events. They’re also the rituals that we celebrate to acknowledge the passage of time or the moving from one stage of life to the next. And every year around the beginning of June, the streets of Stockholm are filled with tradition. And by tradition I mean honking horns, yelling teenagers, and public intoxication.

Teenagers can be seen in various stages of undress, covered in beer, cider, and, for those with a little extra cash, champagne. But this is Sweden during the summer, so there is also rosé. Lots and lots of rosé. That rosé (and cider and beer and champagne) usually ends up being poured out, sprayed on, and drunk by students who are wearing fancy white dresses, nice suits, rain ponchos, swimming suits, costumes, overalls, or, sometimes, just their birthday suits. But there is one constant—the white graduation caps.

That’s because the beginning of June marks high school graduation. This year, most of Stockholm will be graduating sometime between June 2 and June 16. They’ll come running out of the doors of their high school into a pack of family and friends. And yes, literally running. The women usually wearing white dresses, the men usually in dark suits, their little white graduation caps perched perilously on their heads.

They’ll be met by their parents, who are usually holding embarrassing or cute pictures blown-up into massive poster-sized signs. In fact, this tradition is so strong that a friend with a two-year old recently told me he had already begun picking out embarrassing photos to use for his son’s graduation, which should be occurring sometime around 2032.

So, to celebrate freedom, high school students will stand, pass out, and try to destroy their livers before leaving their awkward teen years behind them all while being driven around in the beds of trucks. It’s called a studentflak. The more rural folks will be staring at the backend of a tractor as they party in a flatbed trailer. You’ll see them driving around town, birch branches (remember those from Easter?) decorating the corners of the trailer. Banners with some identifying information about the class, the school, the line of study, will hang from the sides. Sometimes, those banners will attempt to be funny. Most of the time, they will fail. Turns out inside jokes are usually only funny to the insiders. Some will even set up entire speaker systems and blare pop music for all the world to hear. Some of the students even decide to take an impromptu bath in the local fountains. It’s an impressive display of celebration and one that no American graduation party can even pretend to compete with. It’s also quite the shock to see in action.

Yup. Look at those graduates carpe-ing the diem.
Picture by JET.

Tourists, expecting the quiet paradise that a Swedish summer promises, are instead met by bedlam contained to the bed of a truck. Those tourists will stop on the side of the road. They’ll stare. They’ll take confused pictures. And then they’ll get angry as that one kid from high school that no one really likes but who is fun at parties sprays cheap beer at the unsuspecting tourists.

That spraying of beer has resulted in some communities in Sweden prohibiting drinking on the trailers. The fact that students aren’t technically old enough to buy alcohol from the state-owned Systembolaget but still have enough beer to fill a small pool doesn’t seem to get much thought. But while alcohol is prohibited by some communities, the police actually re-write the rules for a couple of weeks every year. That’s because, technically, riding in the back of a trailer is very illegal in Sweden.

The police and the Swedish Transport Agency, Transportstyrelsen, even have pages on their website outlining the rules of the studentflak. Many of these rules have been put into place recently, especially after last year’s festivities when at least 12 different serious accidents occurred around the country. One kid managed to get henself (I need a gender-neutral pronoun in English) squeezed between two trucks. Another was knocked off the trailer by a bridge as the truck drove under said bridge. If it weren’t so serious, it’d be funny. Like some sort of Wile E. Coyote sketch.

But this is serious stuff. High school is over. Now it’s more school. Or work. Or unemployment. But it’s not high school. And that’s worth celebrating with some long-standing traditions.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Wednesday was a half-day. Thursday was a holiday. Friday was a squeeze day. And then the weekend came. Again. For those of you scoring at home, that’s the third week of holidays in Sweden since April 1. What is the occasion, you might ask. What could keep the Swedes from working a full week? Christ. Christ can keep Swedes from working a full week.

There he is, Mr. Jesus Christ. There he is, your ideal. The dream of nine million Swedes who are more than secular can come true in Stockholm city. For he may turn out to be the King of humanity.
Picture from Nordiska museet via DigitaltMuseum.se "Väggbonad" by Anders Eriksson is licensed under CC BY 3.0 SE

Thursday was Kristi himmelsfärdsdag. Feast of the Ascension. Forty days after Easter. The celebrations are somewhat subdued. Or non-existent. I suppose people head out to their cabins again. They were out there on Easter weekend, opening them up and airing them out. Then May 1 rolled around and they headed out there again to maybe do some gardening or some drinking. Then Christ headed up to Heaven and Swedes headed out to the country again. To drink and maybe put their boats in the water. It’s a slow progression towards summer. These holidays don’t necessarily serve much of a religious purpose anymore. Instead, they are markers of the passage of the year and the emergence from the darkness. They are also a marker of leisure since, despite what you might believe, not all Swedes own little red cabins in the woods next to a lake where they dock their boat.

Traditionally, and remember, traditions change. Constantly. We are always making new traditions, discarding old ones, and reworking the ones we keep. But traditionally, Kristi himmelsfärdsdag included fire. Obviously. This was mostly in western Sweden and in Skåne, where the Swedes were working to scare away wolves. I assume the fires in all the previous holidays like Valborg had scared away the witches, but those wolves are pesky buggers.

But fires are old hat in Swedish holidays. There were more exciting things afoot. Or a-arm. This was the time of year when women were finally allowed to wear short sleeves. Seriously. That’s because it was often seen as the start of summer. Summer is relative, I suppose, because it is still damn cold in Stockholm this holiday weekend.

It was also a day for young men and women of the town to meet in front of the church without supervision from their parents. Seriously. Strangely enough, there was always a rash of teenagers giving birth in January and February of the next year. Probably just a coincidence. And probably something I just made up. Probably.

For the nature lovers, it was also a time to head out and kill baby foxes. Seriously. Because it was the first day of summer, mamma foxes came out to sleep in the sun with her babies, leaving them exposed to sneaky Swedes who wanted to catch them.

If you’d rather look at animals than kill them, this was also a big day for bird watching. Early in the morning, in southern and central Sweden, folks would get up to go look for the cuckoo and listen to its call. This was known as the gökotta. Gök being the common cuckoo.

While you might not find young men and women meeting in front of the church on Kristi himmelsfärdsdag, you will definitely be able to find birdwatchers heading out early on Thursday morning. I slept in.

On a completely related not, Nordiska museet is a wonderful museum with everything you could ever want to know about Swedish traditions. Their website gives amazing descriptions of many of the Swedish holidays. I borrowed liberally from them and you can too! Check out their website and their Årets dagar section. That effusive praise being said, one thing they don’t mention is the very real threat that Kristi himmelsfärdsdag faced about 20 or 30 years ago.

It turns out that back in the ‘90s, the Swedish government, with help from a committee of parliamentarians, began looking into a change to Swedish holidays. There was a movement to celebrate June 6 as the National Day of Sweden. This movement had been around for a while, but gained steam in the ‘90s. Of course, while Swedes love days off, the powers that be determined there would be economic consequences to all those days off. But the powers that be also really wanted that National Day. Easy! Just switch out an existing holiday for the new one.

There were a few holidays on the chopping blocks: May 1, the Feast of the Ascension, Whit Monday, and the Epiphany. A quick look at that list would suggest Sweden is a deeply religious country. And by religious, I mean Christian. It is not. At least, not by church attendance standards or actual belief in God standards. But religious holiday standards? Praise the Lord!

Finally in 2005, when the National Day of Sweden became an official public holiday, Whit Monday or Annandag pingst, was no more. Kristi himmelsfärdsdag survived and Swedes continued to take a Thursday off (and sometimes a Wednesday and a Friday for good measure) to celebrate a religious figure that few actually worship. Traditions are weird.